A Review of Cyborg Fever by Laurie Sheck (Tupelo Press, 2025) By Vikki C.
Laurie Sheck’s Cyborg Fever masterfully blurs fact and fiction to emulate the complex boundaries we face in an increasingly AI automated world. It is this symbiosis of fact (science) and speculative wonder that hybridises this work of exceptional depth, in querying the attrition of human connection. Surpassing fiction's traditional bounds, its higher poetic language serves to capture the impossible delirium of the mind and ego in a technological age.
A space where machine sentience seems to catalyse our quest to resolve the human paradox across an almost alien expanse of love. The sparse prose figuratively mirrors the entropy of matter and its tendency to move apart – and ironically too, how this separation is a shared affinity to our aloneness. The narrative is partly voiced through quotes and findings by prominent physicists, engineers and futurists such as Ludwig Boltzmann, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Nicola Tesla, and philosophers like Francis Bacon.
In the opening, these factual fragments seem to collide and disrupt each other in a vernacular that witnesses the speaker’s relationship with a mysterious character Funes, a “researcher” who beholds a wealth of knowledge and at points, seems to evolve as prophetic and spiritual in nature. Yet we see that he too is in decline via his habitual smoking and inability to move his legs as he worked at his computer – much like his real scientific contemporaries whose lives were often plagued by mental rupture.
It is this human fracturing that emulates the larger chaos of the cosmos. A looking glass that propels the self into dimensions, we cannot say for sure are real or subconscious. I was enthralled how this fine line acted as a conduit through lifetimes and limits, death and the euphoria of rediscovery. The fantastic scenarios invoke a sublime catharsis, and the fragile lines, a lament for a tender past.
If by fate, AI came to revolutionise us, it was to resolve the interior distances of the heart we've longed to transcend. An ingenious meld of form and language that exemplifies our vulnerability amid the profound powers of creation.